compression and cracks for dummies.txt

1000 HOWTOs for various needs [WINDOWS]

an Installation menu to install any of the games on the cd. All Plug and Play.
Also the CD Games that are designed to play from the CD'S will do so just the
same so all your Hard drive space isn't robbed.

Q.   What exactly does CD-Ripped Mean?

A.   It means that the program has been taken directly from the Original
CD-Rom. This can mean many things. It may be 100% Exactly like the Original
or it may be only working parts of the program. I will follow this with some 
examples so you will get the Idea!

(1) DARK Forces CD-Rip 50 Megs. This is the full version of Lucas arts DOOM
    II Killer, Dark Forces. When you purchase this CD Title from the store
    and proceed to install it, You will have 2 option's Minimal Install (5)
    Megs or Full install (70 Megs). The instruction suggest that you do the
    full install if you have the hard drive room because the game will play so 
    much better. The CD Rip is the Full 100% Installed version. The only
    difference between this release on CD-Rom 17 and the Original CD Is that
    you cannot do a minimal install and play off the CD-Rom drive.
(2) Disc World (Psygnosis)  When this Original CD Game is purchased, It 
    contains about 30 Megs of Game and music, And 300 Megs of Digital Voice
    files. The CD Rip from CD-Rom #17 contains everything except the 300 Meg
    Voice files. When you install this CD-Rom Rip you need to set the sound
    card configuration for Music but No Digital Speech sound card. That way
    all Interaction is written to the screen for you to read instead of the
    character actually speaking. This CD Rip is exactly like the Floppy disk 
    version.
(3) X-COMM II Terror from the DEEP CD-Rom Rip. This is Exactly like the 
    Original store bought CD Rom. No Difference. It is a Major graphic and
    sounds improvement from the Floppy version although game play is the 
    same.

     The above three examples pretty much cover CD-Romm Rips. There have 
also been CD-Rom ripps released that are complete Abortions. They are so
ripped apart that they are almost impossible to play but I do not post these
on my filelists.

Q.   Please explain how CD Rom Rips are packaged.

A.   Will because of the vast storage capacity of CD-Roms (650 Megs) most
companies don't compress the files on the CD, And because Pirating CD-Roms
is almost un-Heard of (Hehe) they don't use much protection. At most the only
protection I have ever seen is that the program actually looks to make sure
the CD Is in the CD Rom drive. A simple CD-Rom Check Crack is all that is 
needed to defeat this. The easiest way to ripp a cd would be to PkZip the 
entire CD-Rom. Ie. PkZip.exe -R -P c:\game\ripoff E:\*.* example would create
a file in the games dir of C:\ named ripoff.zip . Only problem here is that
file could be huge, Like 50 Megs and most people don't have enough BBS Time
in one session to download 50 Megs. Therefore we need to split the file into
smaller chunks. The size of a 1.44 Floppy seems to be the standard. This is
not done so as to put this rip on floppies but rather give you the ability to
download a few files each time you call the BBS. Also by using a program like
ARJ.EXE we can get maximum compression as most cd's do not contain compressed
files. There is a simple command line parameter that will ARJ Any CD-Rom, File
or Groups of files into multiple .ARJ Files. As explained earlier in this
document when this is done it typical creates ARJ Data extension files as
follows.
GAME.ARJ
GAME.A01
GAME.A02
GAME.A03
ETC.......
 
Each file being 1.44 Kb in size. There is other ways to do the ARJ but the 
bottom line is if you see files with extensions like .A01 or .001 .002 .003
etc. The its probably ARJ Files. 

Q.   How do I go about taking these Data extension files and making the
        game install or run?

A.   The answer is lots of Hard drive space. To begin thou you need to 
Un Arj the files as follows.

ARJ X -v -y GAME.ARJ d:\temp

The above example would Un-Arj and create an exact image of everything
that was on the CD and do it in the Temporary directory on D Drive. You can
then Delete the .Arj, .A01 etc files to free up some hard drive space as you
are done with these. Now you will most likely need to Install the game just
as if you wer installing the game from the CD-Rom. In order to sucsesfully
do this you will most likely need to Substitute your D:\TEMP Directory for
another drive so that the Install program will seem to think its a CD-Rom 
drive and not the subdirectory of your D:\ Hard disk. Do the following.

(1)  Make sure that the LastDrive command in the Autoexec.bat = Z
(2)  From Dos Type   SUBST H: D:\TEMP  Where H: does not exist on your
     system and D:\TEMP Is where you Un-Arjed to.
(3)  Change directory to H: and type Install or Setup. Or if Its Windows
     Load windows and Run Setup from the H: drive in Filemanager.
(4)  Proceed as required but make sure that if give more than one Install
     method, You choose Full install so that all files are installed to the
     hard drive.
(5)  After this is complete you can DEL all files in D:\TEMP or 
     Deltree d:\temp 
(6)  Try to run the game. If there is an error message, Cannot find CD-Rom
     or C:\Game is not a CD-Rom drive ETC... Then you will need to Patch it
     with a crack or whatever it takes. Read the .NFO Files on the 1st Zip
     file for all information needed to get it going.
   
That's basicly all there is to it. Its pretty much common sense and will worth
the effort to get these awsome releases working.

Q.   I have come across some games that have .001 .002 .003 - .027 files
and when I try to un-Arj them I get a Not An ARJ File. Whats up!

A.   Yup! Some Idiot group out there has decided to use Pkzip to Ripp
the CD'S and then break them down using another program like Carve or Zip
chucker pro. When done with Zip Chunker pro and that program is also on the
disk the it works pretty good. Just use Zip Chunker pro to reasemple all the
files back to one huge zip file and then Unzip that file to the temporary 
directory. other than requiring more Hard drive space to get thru the install
process there is not a problem with this.  The problem is with a program
called CARVE.EXE. It seems a if the person was sucsesfull in Carving the 
monster zip file down into 1.44 Kbyte files but when we use Carve.exe to Put
in back together it fails.

Q.   OK so I have 29 Files with .001 thru .029 and CARVE.EXE wont put them
back into one big zip file. What can I do.

A.   Will its a Piece of Cake! (Hehehe) You may have to think about it for
A while but this will work.  OK we are going to use the DOS Join Option within
the COPY Command. If you want more information about the Dos COPY Command
type Help Copy from any DOS Prompt. 
     We would like to join all of these 29 files together but DOS wont
let use type that long of a command line so we will join them 5 at a time
until we get 6 files then we will join the six into one. Confused? Just
follow along and I think you will get the Idea. The 29 files are named
GAME.001   GAME.002  ---------- thru GAME.029

(1) From the Dos prompt type exactly line exactly pressing enter after each 
    line also make sure your current directory is where all the files are. 
    Also make sure you have enough hard drive space available.

COPY /B GAME.001 + GAME.002 + GAME.003 + GAME.004 + GAME.005 NEW.001
COPY /B GAME.006 + GAME.007 + GAME.008 + GAME.009 + GAME.010 NEW.002
COPY /B GAME.011 + GAME.012 + GAME.013 + GAME.014 + GAME.015 NEW.003
COPY /B GAME.016 + GAME.017 + GAME.018 + GAME.019 + GAME.005 NEW.004
COPY /B GAME.020 + GAME.021 + GAME.022 + GAME.023 + GAME.024 NEW.005
COPY /B GAME.025 + GAME.026 + GAME.027 + GAME.028 + GAME.029 NEW.006
DEL GAME.*    ;(rem) FREE UP SOME HARD DRIVE SPACE
COPY /B NEW.001 + NEW.002 + NEW.003 + NEW.004 + NEW.005 + NEW.006 FINAL.ZIP
DEL NEW.*    ;(rem) FREE UP SOME MORE HARD DRIVE SPACE

     At this point you will be left with one MONSTER File called Final.zip
and if you typed everything correctly you can now Unzip that file to your
temporary directory. Ie: D:\TEMP and then delete that BIG! .Zip file. Its a 
little more complicated but the end result is the same. If you don't use the
DOS Command line history utility (DOSKEY) The start as it will save you a lot
of time typing commands.

(2)  Now go to the temporary directly and install the game.

Q.   I install the CD-Rom Rips and even crack to CD Check but the game
wont run. It keeps saying that MsCdex isn't loaded and I do not have a CD
Rom in my computer so I cant load it. Is there anything I can do?

A.   Sure! You need the file CDEMU2.COM Its a small MSCDEX Cd Romm
driver for network drives. That means it wont check your system to see if 
theirs a CD-Rom installed because it assumes it could be on another computer
on A network. Just put the file in your Dos Directory and from the dos
Prompt type CDEMU2 H: where H: is a Subistuted drive.  You could create a 
small batch file to load the game as follows.

MD C:\temp1                  ;REM  Make phoney dir for substitute drive
SUBST H: C:\temp1            ;REM  Substitute Phony drive for H:
C:\DOS\CDEMU2.COM H:         ;REM  Load MSCDEX Driver for H:
cd\Games                     ;REM  Change to the Game directory
Game.exe                     ;REM  Load Game
SUBST /D H:                  ;REM  Remove Subistuted drive with /D Switch
RD C:\temp1                  ;REM  Remove Temporary directory (House Cleaning)


NOTE:  MSCDEX does not have to point to the drive with the game. Its just that
       the game will check to see if MSCDEX is running.

Q.   The CD Games take so much hard drive space Isn't is just better to 
BUY The CD.

A.   Will I always condone supporting the Software Authors but I don't 
believe your argument is Valid. I just purchased A 1.3 GIG Western Digital
hard drive for $325.00. It wouldn't take purchasing very many CD Rom games
at $49.00 to buy a couple of them. Also If you buy A CD and it a piece of
shit game then your out. Getting it from me and you just delete it from your
hard drive and move on to the next one. Hell one thing is for sure. When a 
CD Rom game is 100% Installed to the Hard drive it plays much better and 
faster than when its loading scenes from the CD-Rom. Even Quad speed is slow
compared to a hard drive.

Q.   What will we do when all of the CD Games are two big to put on the
Hard drive. when there over 100 Megs its not worth it.

A.   That's why I now offer GOLD Series disks. These are disks that contain
many CD Games on One CD-Rom. with some games as big as 600 Megs. That will be
the future for a while. As the CD Programs get bigger the price of blank CD's
will come down. At some point I believe we may carry our portable CD-Rom
drives from house to house copying CD'S just as we did for years with floppy
disks. If and when they introduce CD-Rom Disc based Protection like putting 
certain physical errors on the disc's then it could get interesting but for
now we change with the times and have FUN!

 
     FINAL Comments for April 27 1994.

     Commenting on past issues. Clone CPU Makers have finally caught up 
with INTEL. AMD Is selling more DX/4 100 Megz CPUs in one month than INTEL
will sell is 6 Months. Cirix still hasn't caught on to much but after the 
INTEL Pentium Math bug INTEL has lost some of its market share. As for PC
operating systems IBM/Warp is still the most user friendly for running DOS
and windows programs. As for Windows 95, Bill Gates held to his Promise and 
removed all support for your Previous DOS Operating system. In fact when you
Install the newest Beta the install program deletes all of your Dos Commands
and replaces them with Win95 commands. This is a Bold move by Microsoft 
because if they can get it to fly they would have a Monopoly on PC Computers.
If you decide to use Windows 95 then you will need to Buy or use all Windows
programs because the Dos support is worth shit anymore. Because of this there
has been a ton of BAD Press on Win95 forcing Microsoft to delay its release
until Aug 1994. Microsoft did decide to release some 400,000 copies at $29.00
each. This is just a bullshit smoke screen. Its there way of releasing the
program for sale but still calling it a late Beta. That way the press cant be
to hard on them. I personally hope the whole Product Dies!. But! Of course it
wont. Bill Gates isn't the richest man in the world because he is stupid.
Although after releasing a program like MICROSOFT BOB One would have to 
wonder about him. 

                         Bad boy!
                                           The WarEZhouse BBS
                                           [phone]
                                           USR V-34 Everything 28.800
                                           5 Gigs Hard drive
                                           12 Gigs 100% Check software
                                           Software available on
                                           4MM/90M D.A.T. Tape
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